


Didn't Know

by bythedamned



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-08
Updated: 2010-11-08
Packaged: 2017-11-18 00:45:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bythedamned/pseuds/bythedamned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only someone who's lived without one, knows the true burden of a soul. Dean thought Sam would be better off with one in him, but he didn't know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Didn't Know

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not mine, none of it. 
> 
> Many thanks to my marvelous beta [elveys-stuff](elveys-stuff.livejournal.com)

All Sam knows is that it hurts.

He can feel it, where for a time he felt nothing. Like spines piercing every cell of his body, paralyzing him. There is nothing but agony and it pins him, sweaty and aching, to the bed.

He can feel it, questioning him, when he used to just know. Now he’s weighed down by the pain of death, of doing the right thing even though it’s hard, of there being difficult decisions in the first place. It wedges itself under his fingernails, behind his eyes and down his throat, suffocating him with devastation and self-doubt.

Dean is hovering over him, pushing matted hair from his forehead and looking beaten, like he’s tried to give up hope, knows that he should have long ago, but couldn’t quite manage. His touch is firm, present, and the only reason Sam is even awake.

“How you doin’ there?”

“It hurts,” Sam says, and salt leaks from his eyes. It streaks hot tracks down to his temples, through the grit caked there, and he feels exactly like that. It’s the clean parts, shiny new and free of the filth, that hurt the most.

Somehow, to Dean this means everything worked out, because all the creases in his face just fade away. “I know,” he says, because he thinks it’s the bruises of being flung against walls by whatever had animated his corpse and didn’t want to give it up, the pain of smacking his head against picture frame corners, but it’s not.

It’s knowing that every day there are twenty four hours, with sixty minutes of sixty seconds each, and in every one of those he will have to make a decisions that might get someone killed. It’s knowing that he already has.

He'd lived with the pain before, accepting his burdens like one accepts east versus west, and it's only in contrast to living blessedly pain-free does he feel how deeply it shreds him now.

“It’s okay, Sammy,” Dean says and, god, Dean hadn’t called him that since he knew, knew for sure what was wrong with his brother. There’s so much latent affection in his words that it hurts even more, because Sam remembers yearning for it. Like he will again, now.

Dean thought he could fix it, could give Sam the one thing to make it all better, but he didn’t know.

For the rest of his life, nothing will hurt more than a soul.


End file.
